A/N: This is the first real fic that I've written, and I hope it does justice to Pullman's wonderful series. Please review.

Disclaimer: As is obvious, I am not Phillip Pullman, I do not own Cittàgazze, the tower of the angels, or anything else that comes from canon. I'm only entertaining myself, and getting writing tips from this.

The Dare

"Come on! I dare You!"

"Wimp!"

"Loser!"

Marie looked up at the Torre degli Angeli. She thought she could do it. They'd only dared her to stay in there for five minutes. So what if it was the most haunted building in the entire world. She was not going to admit to being frightened.

"Fine then!" She yelled over the choruses of insults. "I will. But I won't stay in for just five minutes!" She didn't know what was making her say this! She didn't want to have anything to do with the tower, yet for some reason she felt almost drawn to it now. "I'll stay in there for a whole hour!"

Everyone around her gasped. Typical whispers of "She's crazy!" or "Did I hear right?" swept through the crowd. Well, she might be crazy, but she did speak clear enough. "Yeah! I'll stay in for a whole hour!" She said clearly. "And," she continued, powered by a foreign force. "I'll bring something back to!" She practically screamed.

"Someone give her a watch!" a kid yelled. A black wristwatch was thrown towards her, and she caught it in one hand and slipped it on carefully.

"It's set to go off in an hour!" The boy who had thrown it yelled.

"Nobody ever comes out of there!"

"I wonder if there even is anything for her to get in there! I thought it was totally deserted!"

Marie started walking briskly towards the tower of the Angels. Half way there, she turned around and gave the group of kids a thumbs up and a confident smile. "See ya' in a hour!"

She continued to the entrance, and pushed open the rickety wooden door that had been decaying for the last hundred years. Marie knew this place hadn't always been haunted. It had once been a wonderful place, and it still had signs of splendor around it.

She stepped in, wooden planks creaking under her bare feet. She heard a round of clapping in the distance. "Did they really think I'd chicken out after touching the door?"

Probably, that nagging little voice in her head said. She rolled her eyes. Sometimes she wondered if her conscience was more sarcastic than her. Her mind flicked back to the story her father had told her, which apparently not many people knew.

What very few people of this age knew was that this wasn't the original Torre degli Angeli. The genuine one was destroyed about eight generations ago, during the time of Marie's great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents. It had been destroyed by the government after a time where there were hundreds of thousands of spectres around the city. But then, all the buildings around it had been destroyed, and everyone grew worried, sop they decided to rebuild the tower as a sort of apology, and thanks as the spetres had all disappeared then also.

But it wasn't that great. The whole thing was an almost exact replica of the original tower, but everything was wooden, rather than whatever it had been before. But now, it stood totally isolated from the rest of Cittàgazze, and even though it was considered sacred by most adults, all the kids were convinced that it was haunted.

She looked around. The one kid who had said that the place was empty was about a thousand miles off. The place was crammed, mainly was junk that people had just thrown in haphazardly. She inhaled deeply. Well, she wasn't scared yet, and she didn't think she'd get to terrified in the next few minutes either. In fact, she felt much more confident than before. She felt as though nothing could go wrong.

As she continued looking around, a weird image came to her from nowhere. She saw the room she was in, but with another small addition. There was a lion cub in the middle of the floor. She almost laughed, as she realized that had to be impossible. There weren't any lions Cittàgazze! How absurd! There were some in the far away country of Africa, but not here! She shook the vision out of her mind, and made for the stairs heading down. Hey, she had an hour, why not explore the whole place?

Another random fact resurfaced in her mind as she inched her way down the rickety stairs. The basement was the only thing that was from the original Tower of Angels. She smiled. "There's better be a trophy down here for my bravery," she said smugly.

I'm sure there is, the voice in her head said. Marie couldn't help but roll her eyes. "Whatever." I think there's something in the corner, the voice insisted. Marie blinked. "Go look."

Marie jumped, and started breathing hard. That was a voice... But she was the only one there. It was that voice. The voice that had been in her head so many years, guiding her along was there. Was her conscience coming to life? No, that was below impossible!

"W-w-w-ho i-is th-th-that?" she stammered, standing still right in the middle of the room.

"Me ya' idiot."

"I don't think y-you can exactly can me an i-idiot..."

"Marie... Marie... Marie..."

"What?" Marie choked.

"It's me." Marie started looking around trying to find the source of the voice. She couldn't see anything. "Up," the voice encouraged. Marie ran her tongue over her lips and looked up and saw a beautiful Bald Eagle starring back at her. A weird shiver crossed over. It wasn't one of fear, or hate, or any feeling she could recognize.

"It's about time... I hate guessing games just as much as you do." Marie was transfixed. What... Who... How... and all those other 'W' questions that you learn in primary school. She'd like to just scream and run away, but she had a weird feeling about this bird.

"Yes, I am the voice in your head." It said both out loud and in her head.

"W-w-w-hat?" Marie managed to stutter.

"I expect you wonder who I am, why I can talk to you in your head, where I came from, what I'm doing now, and why I haven't contacted you sooner." The eagle asked.

"Well, you can obviously read my mind... Why are you asking?" Marie said, finally getting her voice and sense of sarcasm back.

"Well, I'll answer the important stuff first. Who am I? Well... I'm you." Marie raised her eyebrows.

"Well... I'm a human... You're a bird... You can't-"

"You don't believe in can't do you. And as a matter of fact, I'm no bird... right now." Within the space of a blink, a cat was now sitting in the spot of the eagle. Marie took a few steps back and realized she was closer to the wall than she had thought. Her back hit the wall, and she pushed back, wanting to get farther away from the creature.

Then, the creature turned into a bird again, this time a dove. "And I can assume just about any other form you'd like, but I won't go through that. And as for exactly what I am... Well, I'm a daemon." It watched Marie's already pale face pale. "Oh no, not the silly kind you have here. A daemon," he said slow and clearly. "Although I guess I can't explain that without explaining everything else." He took a deep breath and turned back into a bald eagle. "I'm just going to be frank. You're not normal." Marie couldn't help laughing. "I don't know how best to say this, but you're mother's the really abnormal one." Marie's face plainly gave away the obvious disbelief at the statement. Her mother was a perfectly normal, run of the mill sort of person. There was absolutely nothing abnormal about her.

"Oh, no silly!" The eagle made a sound like laughter. "She's not your mother! Your mother... Well..." it paused trying to figure out what to say. "Well... She's a witch from another world."

Marie slid down the wall at that. She sat, knees curled up to chest trying to figure everything out. The bald eagle flew to her side, and changed into a mongoose. "Yeah... it's all true."

Marie shook her head, sending white blonde hair flying across her face.

Another bird flew into the room, this one a glossy black raven that landed next to the mongoose shaped daemon. "You must go Sopiaron." The raven nudged Marie's daemon softly. "You know what you must do."

Marie looked in wonder and amazement at the other creature she could only assume was another daemon. "But I don't," she managed to croak.

"Well, you'll find out soon," the raven said in a calming voice. Marie took a deep breath... All this for a dare... She was surrounded by talking animals for goodness sake!

"You'll find out soon," her daemon urged. "We've got to go."

"Go where?" Marie asked loudly.

"Out," Sopiaron answered simply.

"Out where?"

"Out of here." The raven took a few wing beats and hovered just above Marie's still curled up legs. She took a deep breath and stood up. "What ever you say," she answered lamely. She had given up all hopes of struggling back, and now passed everything off with the most common excuse.

'I'm dreaming...' That's the only thing that can be happening.

Yeah… Dreaming was the best way top pass all this off. And hey, who'd interfere with a nice dream anyways?

Sopiaron and the other daemon stopped in mid flight. It took Marie a few more steps to understand exactly why they had. She was standing in a dark, cold, dusty basement, but about a square yard or so in the air was completely different. She was looking into a patch of a dark forest.

The crow daemon fluttered through, unhesitantly, but Marie still stood, thinking her legs would collapse under her soon.

"Come on," Sopiaron urged her, not in his typical sarcastic voice, but an earnest one. "We'll be fine, I'm sure of it." He sensed her worries. "Don't worry," he said in a soothing voice. "Just think of it as another part of the dare."

Marie smiled against all she was feeling. She had the feeling that this thing -no, he- wouldn't lead her wrong. They'd be safe. They were one.

She took one last deep breath of the musty air under the Torre degli Angeli of Cittàgazze, and stepped through into a totally foreign place.